The TANNER Series - Books 7-9 (Tanner Box Set Book 3)

by Remington Kane

  “Okay, but call back tomorrow.”

  “I will, I love you, Laurel.”

  “I love you too, Joe.”

  ***

  In Mexico, Alexa was straddling Carlos atop his bed, as she questioned him about Alonso Alvarado.

  She had already cut the old accountant twice on his face, and he seemed to realize that she was serious and would brook no lies.

  “The door from the hall is the only way into his office?”

  “No, there are a set of patio doors, but they’re bulletproof and only open by Alonso’s thumbprint.”

  “And how many men are guarding the office door?”

  “Two at all times, with another two within hearing range, but the guards don’t have a keycard to open the door.”

  Alexa pressed one of her knives harder against Carlos’ neck while she thought things over.

  Getting past the lock on the door would be no problem for her, but the heavily armed guards was another matter. She then cocked her head and stared down at Carlos.

  “Why only two guards at the door?”

  “Only? Two guards is sufficient; after all, we’re inside a compound.”

  “No, two guards is not nearly enough, what are you not telling me?”

  Carlos’ eyes shifted left, then right, and Alexa took her other knife and held it close to his face.

  “Do not hold back, old man, or I’ll blind you.”

  “Body monitors! The guards at the door wear body monitors. If they become excited, lose consciousness, or are killed, an alert goes off in several areas around the compound. Over a dozen men will head towards the office. Alonso has a safe room in there as well, behind the bathroom wall. Now please, I’m begging, do not blind me.”

  Alexa eased off of Carlos and backed away from the bed.

  She saw the old man give a sigh of relief, and then he opened his mouth to call for the guard. Instead of sound issuing forth, razor-sharp steel entered, as Alexa flung a knife into Carlo’s open mouth.

  It hit with such force that its tip was sticking out from the base of his neck. Alexa watched the bastard die, and smiled. Alonso Alvarado had killed her entire family, by killing his brother-in-law and oldest friend, she had just given him a taste of what that was like.

  After pulling her knife free, she checked herself for signs of blood and found only three small specks on her white belt. She cleaned them off in the bathroom and headed for the door. She still had to get past the guard.

  When she stepped from the room, she saw the guard give her a humorous look, and after she closed the door behind her, the man whispered conspiratorially to her.

  “The old bastard doesn’t have much stamina; you were only in there for a short time.”

  Alexa pouted.

  “I’m still horny; could you help me with that?”

  The guard looked around.

  “Here, in the hall?”

  “The old guy is asleep, and there’s no one near, right?”

  “Not close, no.”

  Alexa stepped forward and began unbuckling the man’s belt with one hand, as the other hand freed a knife.

  The smile left the guard’s face an instant after the knife slipped between his ribs and nicked an artery leading to his heart.

  He backed away while unslinging his rifle, but collapsed to the floor before he could do anything else.

  Alexa opened the bedroom door and dragged the man inside, and then cursed as she saw the blood on the hallway carpet. She had hoped to keep both bodies hidden and undetected for as long as possible, but if anyone so much as glanced down the corridor, they would spot the blood.

  She went into the bathroom and grabbed a blue bathmat, this, she laid over the bloodstain. It looked totally out of place atop the white carpet, but might buy her time. And she needed time, because she still had to get out of the house and back over the wall.

  Before leaving, she reentered the bedroom and gathered up the laptops. There were five altogether, some obviously old, but she took them all into the bathroom and smashed them open upon the lip of the tub, to remove the hard drives.

  Carlos Ayala had been with Alvarado for decades as his chief money man, and Alexa was willing to bet that the information in the laptops was pure gold.

  She considered taking the dead guard’s rifle with her, but decided against it. She would need speed more than an arsenal, and the clunky rifle would only slow her down.

  She made it back outside without incident and headed for the laundry room where she had left her camouflage suit. She would need it, because she was about to set off the motion detectors, and if she could just go unseen by the guards in the tower long enough, she might make it to her rope and back over the wall before being shot.

  She left the house by the rear door and listened carefully. When she was certain that she heard nothing, she sprinted for the wall.

  When her movements didn’t trigger the lights, it perplexed her, but then she heard a growl come from behind and understood.

  The dogs were loose again, and if the one chasing her caught her, she’d die from a ripped throat.

  Alexa kept running as the wall drew closer, but she saw no sign of her rope. However, she did see something rushing towards her from the left. It was another dog, no, two more dogs, and the canine killers were moving at twice her speed.

  Alexa silently asked for help from her beloved deceased abuela, her grandmother, while hoping that she would not soon be joining her and the rest of the family in heaven.

  CHAPTER 24 – The right woman

  After talking to Joe, Laurel went out onto the porch and found that Maria was already enjoying the night air.

  “You’re smiling; you must have had good news,” Maria said.

  “Yes, my fiancé says that I may be able to return in a day or two, but that’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed being here, and Mrs. Salgado may be the best cook in the world.”

  Maria smiled.

  “She might be. If I didn’t watch my weight I could easily grow fat eating her cooking.”

  “I want to thank you again, Maria. It was beyond nice of you to have me here.”

  “Nonsense, it was my pleasure, and not just because it gave us a chance to meet, but it allowed me to repay Tanner just a little bit.”

  “Romina told me how he saved her from that crazy ex-boyfriend, and she looks very happy with Chaz.”

  “Yes, although it’s a little odd that I’m seeing the father of the boy she’s dating, we’re all happy, and we owe some of that to Tanner.”

  The two women grew quiet for a time, but then Maria broke it with a question.

  “Is there a chance that Tanner could come here?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Too bad, I would love to see him again.”

  “When Tanner was here, did you two become... very close?”

  Maria smiled.

  “Are you asking if I slept with him?”

  “I was, and forget I asked. It’s none of my business.”

  “I considered it, and at the time; I hadn’t been with a man since my husband died. And if not for Romina, I might have asked Tanner to my bed, but bedding the man would not have sent a good signal to my daughter.”

  “Why, because you knew that Tanner wasn’t the type to stick around?”

  “Yes, and it would have been a bit too casual for myself as well, but I take it that you’re the same way, or else you and Tanner would have stayed close. That was the term you used, wasn’t it? That you and he were once close.”

  “Yes, and part of me still loves him.”

  “I can see that, but I know Tanner well enough to know that he’s scared of commitment. I think he may also fear abandonment. Perhaps someone he loved left him or died suddenly, like a mother, those scars can run very deep.”

  “Yes,” Laurel said, as she thought about the boy, Cody Parker, the child who lost his mother at a young age, and later lost everyone else. If such a boy had survived a tragedy like the horr
or that befell the Parkers, he would likely fear commitment and avoid loss.

  “Tanner will find the right woman someday,” Maria said. “But she had better be as tough as he is.”

  ***

  When she was ten feet from the wall, a breeze blew across the courtyard and caused her rope to sway slightly. Alexa had matched its color so perfectly to that of the gray wall that she had been unable to distinguish it until it moved.

  She leapt up as high as she could and gripped the rope tightly, even as the wall behind it scraped the skin from her knuckles.

  Two of the dogs missed her as they leapt up, but the third dog, a massive Rottweiler, sank his teeth into the hem of her camouflage. It was the part of the disguise she wore like a cape over her head. The dog’s weight was pulling on it, so that one edge of it was yanked tight against her neck.

  Alexa reached down to her belt while holding the rope with one hand and, after gripping a knife, she sliced at the fabric. It caused the piece clamped in the dog’s mouth to tear free, and the hound fell backwards to the ground.

  The searchlight came on, and it was so bright that just the edge of its beam blinded Alexa.

  The guard manning the light had aimed it at the base of the wall. When the man saw that the dogs were all looking up, he turned the beam that way, and Alexa was lit brilliantly as she topped the wall.

  She had just managed to flip the rope onto the other side of the wall when the rifle retort sounded, and she felt something tug at her camouflage cape.

  Before the tower guard could take another shot, she was heading down the rope away from his view, but before she reached the bottom, lights blazed on and an alarm began blaring.

  The lights lit the darkness out to fifty feet from the wall before the night reclaimed the desert. Despite knowing that the guards in the towers would be looking for her, Alexa ran out into the light.

  Two tower guards had a view of the area she ran in and either of them might cut her down, but she had to risk it, because their guns would soon be joined by many others, and then she would die for sure.

  She weaved about as she ran, trying to make herself harder to hit. She had prepared for this, for the eventuality that she might have to flee under pursuit, but to activate the precautions she had taken Alexa first had to make it away from the wall.

  One round actually passed between her legs a second before the blessed darkness swallowed her. She kept weaving as the guards kept firing, but their shots were going wide as she veered right, to stay parallel with the wall.

  They would be expecting her to run away, to get distance, and so their shots sailed far over her head.

  She was looking back at the wall as she ran, and using it as a guidepost. Lightning had struck it at some point and scarred a section forty feet from the center tower.

  In one of her many prior excursions to the compound, Alexa had set up several traps. They were all hidden beneath the sand and covered by more camouflage material, and they had taken her many nights of hard work to complete.

  When she was in position and lined up with the scar on the wall, she turned and ran deeper into the darkness. There were no plants to trip over, no cacti to run into, not if she was running in the right direction.

  Alexa counted as she ran, knowing that time wasn’t on her side. When she reached the count of fifty, she got down and began to crawl.

  She had been crawling forward for several seconds and starting to fear that she was in the wrong area, when her hand dipped into something soft. It was the camouflage she’d left in place over her first trap.

  She skirted around it, and had just made it to the other side when the dogs came, as she knew they would.

  There were four of them altogether, each a great slobbering beast weighing over a hundred pounds, and as they ran onto the camouflage netting, it sank into the ground. The tapered pit was ten feet deep and the dogs went down into it, even as the weighted netting followed and covered them up.

  Their growling became fierce and mixed with whimpering, but Alexa had placed no stakes at the pit’s bottom. The dogs were pawns. They needed to be handled, but she hadn’t the heart to kill them.

  However, the men approaching in the jeeps were another matter.

  Alexa positioned herself behind a cactus and became nearly invisible within her camouflage cape.

  Two jeeps came towards her, with one in the lead and two more that were just leaving the compound. When she was at the very edge of the first jeep’s headlights, she dropped the hood on the cape and let them glimpse her face, which must have looked as if it were floating alone in the dark atop her camouflaged body.

  She caught the attention of the driver of the nearest jeep and then let the hood swallow her up again. Someone in the jeep fired several shots, but Alexa had already dived to the right and lay flat, so the bullets passed overhead.

  The driver had lost sight of her, but he stayed on course for her last position, and although the ditch he drove into wasn’t nearly as deep as the one the dogs were trapped in, it still bogged down the vehicle’s front tires and caused the men inside to slam their heads against the windshield.

  Alexa raced towards the vehicle and killed the stunned men before they knew what was happening, as she slashed open their throats.

  She took one of the men’s guns, an AR-15, and raced off as the second jeep approached. It sped past the disabled jeep for twenty feet before its right front tire found another ditch and fell into it.

  Alexa opened fire with the AR-15 and killed both men.

  She then turned and ran as fast as she dared in the scant moonlight, as the other two jeeps came on.

  As she hoped they would, the men stopped to assess what had happened to their comrades. They would see the ditches, the dead bodies, and would think twice about continuing their pursuit.

  That had been the plan, but the bastards in the jeeps weren’t willing to play by her rules.

  The last two jeeps came on, and fast.

  Alexa shook her head. Were they fools? Had they not seen the ditches? But then she realized that they feared losing her more than they feared crashing.

  If she escaped, they would likely be killed for their failure to capture her, while the ditches might only break their arms and grant them an excuse.

  But there were no more ditches, just open desert, and Alexa’s van was still far away.

  The sound of the jeeps grew louder, as Alexa ran for all she was worth.

  CHAPTER 25 – The spy who loved me

  Juan Alvarado screamed in Rico’s face. They were inside Juan’s suite and had just received word that Tanner had been spotted at the Hotel Rutherford.

  “Take the men there now!”

  “Was the man certain it was Tanner?”

  “He swears it was, and we’ll never get another chance like this, take every available man, storm that hotel from all sides, and kill anything that moves.”

  “What if it’s a trap?”

  “It’s no damn trap. What’s wrong with you, Rico, are you scared of Tanner?”

  “I don’t fear him; I respect him.”

  Juan’s phone rang, when he looked at it, he saw that his father was calling.

  “Hello Father, I’ve got more great news.”

  Juan listened to the phone for a moment as his father told him the compound had been breached.

  “How many men? And was this an attack by Sandoval?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Alonso told his son. “But the guards will find them.”

  “Oh, so the guards are tracking them down, that’s good, but listen, we know where Tanner is. I’m sending Rico and the men after him, so soon all our worries will be over.”

  “Excellent, Juan, I knew you could handle things there.”

  Rico held out his hand.

  “Let me speak to him.”

  Juan made a face.

  “Rico wants to talk to you, Father; I think he’s afraid to face Tanner again.”

  Juan handed Rico the phone, and he spo
ke to Alvarado.

  “I am not afraid. You know me better than that Alonso, but this Tanner is a devil. I do not trust how easy this is.”

  Rico listened for a moment, and then sighed.

  “As you wish, but remember that I wanted to wait and check things out further. Yes, here’s Juan again.”

  Juan took the phone, and then glared at Rico.

  “What are you waiting for? Take the men and kill Tanner.”

  “Yes sir,” Rico said, and he held in the curses until he was sure that Juan couldn’t hear them.

  ***

  Alexa dived behind a cactus and laid flat before the headlights of the pursuing jeeps could spot her. Although they knew she was in the vicinity, they didn’t know where, or else they would have fired on her.

  As the jeeps grew closer, they slowed, almost as if the men inside them sensed her.

  That’s when the searchlight came on from the jeep on the left. Whether it was luck or the man had spotted her, whoever had control of the light hit her square in the eyes with it and blinded her.

  Alexa fired the remaining rounds in the AR-15 even as she rolled to her left. Luck was with her as well, as she heard a man scream above the sound of breaking glass.

  The light was out, but then the shooting began, and Alexa braced herself for the impact of the bullets.

  “Stop firing!”

  It was a deep voice giving the order and it came from the jeep on the right.

  “We know where you are. If you want to live, walk towards us slowly with your hands in the air.”

  Alexa wanted to tell the man to go to hell, but she also wanted to live. She stood slowly from where she lay, her hood had fallen back, and she saw the surprise on the men’s faces when they saw that she was a woman.

  The deep voice spoke again, and this time Alexa could see its owner’s face.

  He was a large man in his forties with a bushy mustache, and his gun was pointed at her middle.

  “You’re the one who went over the wall?”

  “Yes,” Alexa said.

  “Why? Who are you working for?”

  The driver from the other jeep stepped out of his vehicle and walked over to stand by the other men.